Archive for the ‘security’ Category

LinkedIn, Twitter and eHarmony are just the latest sites to have suffered a security violation in what seems to be an ongoing catalogue of breaches and hacks over the past few years.

Are these, in the scale of things, just minor – albeit high profile – cases, or is the internet simply not as safe as we hope and believe? A recent report on internet security from Symantec highlighted that there were 5.5 billion malicious attacks online in 2011, an increase of 81% on the previous year.
The same report also showed that one in every 298 emails is a phishing attack seeking information such as passwords or usernames, and one in every 239 is affected by viruses.

If security is the biggest obstacle to businesses – large and small – moving data to the cloud, what’s being done?

A lot, it seems, but it’s all very fragmented. The question is, do these innovations and solutions help resolve security fears and engender confidence among would-be users?

“More and more enterprises now rent space or servers on the cloud to store data. However, the fact that such data remains outside the ambit of the enterprise’s security system and invisible to the enterprise poses a serious security headache,” said Gilad Parann-Nissany on sys-con.

Does it concern you when you get mass broadcast emails that are personalised to make you feel warm towards the sender? Or how about on-screen ads that are so relevant to you it seems someone knows exactly what you are interested in? Well, they do.

And it bothers some members of this forum. “When does personalisation become intrusive?,” asked Nigel Cliffe. “How personalised can things become before there is a privacy backlash?”

There is a world of difference between a solicited confirmation email detailing an order or delivery times and a seemingly relevant (but in fact junk or mass marketing) email.

Data security breaches have risen by 58 per cent in the last year, the Information Commissioner has revealed.

Christopher Graham said that although businesses are taking the protection of their customers’ data more seriously, in fact more breaches were being reported and fewer than half of all individuals believe companies treat personal data appropriately. When asked about online businesses, nearly three-quarters of individuals do not believe their data is secure.

The ICO recently revealed that breaches have ranged from local authorities and schools to estate agents and a host of other businesses. More widespread problems, such as Sony’s PlayStation Network’s recent outage, have affected millions of customers.

Have digital certificates become too unwieldy to be trusted?, asked InformationWeek.

Such certificates are fundamental to the security model employed on the web as they are supposed to ensure that users have a secure and encrypted connection directly to the website they’re visiting.

But if attackers hack into certificate authorities and issue false certificates for legitimate websites, confidence is shot and – worse – fraud will become widespread.

The cause of the concern is that digital certificates issued by GlobalSign came under scrutiny after a hacker’s claim that he broke into a certificate authority’s (CA) computer systems. If true, it would be the second such compromise in the past few weeks, said PC World.